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We're not talking the cheapest of chips here, either. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is still a high-ish-end card by most counts. But its price tag is slipping into the more affordable end of the market by the week, and that's high up on a list of things we absolutely love to see.

The RTX 4070 is probably my favourite graphics card from the current Ada lineup, and of both AMD and Nvidia's new generations. It may be pricier than the old RTX 3070, but it's able to keep pace with the RTX 3080, and sometimes even beat it when you bring DLSS 3 to bear. RTX 4080 again ranks as the most efficient GPU, followed by the RTX 4090, RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4060 Ti, and RTX 4060. Even the RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 rank ahead of AMD's best, which again is the RX 7900 XT. Intel's Arc GPUs are still pretty far down the efficiency list, though in DXR they're often better than AMD's RX 6000-series parts. Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPUs from the past four generations of hardware. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are from the latest Nvidia Ada Lovelace and AMD RDNA 3 architectures. AMD's graphics cards perform well without ray tracing, but tend to fall behind once RT gets enabled — even more so if you enable DLSS, which you probably should, though FSR2 is a reasonable alternative. GPU prices are finally hitting reasonable levels, however, making it a better time to upgrade. There's a bit of a respite in new GPUs, as we haven't had anything launch since last month's Arc A580. We don't expect new cards until the Nvidia 40-series Super parts arrive, whenever that will be (January, probably).And that's more than aesthetics, too. The size of the card hints at the efficiency of the 4nm Ada GPU quietly thrumming away inside of it. If you want a powerful, but low power card, the RTX 4070 fits the bill. Which will no doubt make it the darling of the small form factor PC brigade, and deservedly so. There are a few times when the differences between the XT and XTX are minimal, and the performance delta practically non-existent. The XT is also the much more efficient and cooler running of the two. Generally, though, you get what you pay for with the higher-end XTX card, if not a bit more. AMD also has FSR3 coming soon, providing for frame generation. Like DLSS3, it will add latency, and AMD requires the integration of Anti-Lag+ support in games that use FSR3. But Anti-Lag+ only works with AMD GPUs, which means non-AMD cards will likely incur a rather large latency penalty. It's been designed to beat an RTX 3060 Ti by as tight a performance margin as possible—and you honestly can't argue with the business reasons for doing so—but without DLSS 3 and Frame Generation it certainly doesn't feel like a particularly exciting generational upgrade over the old Ampere card.

We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. ( Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good.

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Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably will come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over the coming year, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing — see our what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria. GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts As the finest Radeon ever made, the AMD RX 7900 XTX has a lot going for it. If it was closer to the RTX 4080 in gaming terms, more regularly, we'd have no hesitation recommending this top red team GPU. The RTX 4060 is a very power efficient GPU, too. It's well suited to gamers with smaller cases or cases with poor airflow as it doesn't dump a lot of heat. The older GTX prefix is now used to denote older Nvidia graphics cards which don't have the extra AI and ray tracing silicon that the RTX-level cards do. This RTX prefix was introduced with the RTX 20-series, and highlights which cards have GPUs which sport both the Tensor Cores and RT Cores necessary for real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

Nowadays you'll only find older 16-series GPUs with the GTX prefix attached, so it's pretty much RTX all the way. Is ray tracing only for RTX cards? On the one hand, it's a hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver when given a long leash, and on the other, a slightly tone-deaf release in light of a global economic crisis that makes launching a graphics card for a tight, very loaded minority of gamers feel a bit off. The RX 7800 XT has some 4K gaming chops, as you would expect from a card that's offering performance right up there with the high-end of AMD's previous generation of GPUs. At this level you are going to need some upscaling to deal with any ray-traced lighting effects, however, as away from pure rasterised rendering you can see the RX 7800 XT start to chug with this many pixels on screen. And with the extra genuine performance of the upscaled frames and the interpolated smoothness of the AI-generated frames, the performance improvement is spectacular where DLSS 3 is available. Which should be more and more often, with Nvidia's Streamline SDK offering devs a one-stop option for enabling it and other vendors' upscaling tech too.

While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's only 3% faster than the next closest RX 7900 XTX at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 8% at 1440p and then 23% at 4K. Against the RTX 3090 Ti, it's also a major upgrade: 14% faster at 1080p, 27% faster at 1440p, and 51% faster at 4K. After years of massively inflated GPU pricing, is the RX 7600 the card the market has been crying out for? The RX 7600 is easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia. Though it's important not to overlook Intel's Arc cards either. For now, the RX 7600 is touted as being a solid option if you're after a card on a tight budget. The RTX prefix is only used to denote cards which house Nvidia GPUs with dedicated ray tracing hardware, but AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs also support real-time ray tracing acceleration.

You'll need an RTX 4070 or RTX 3080 or faster GPU to handle 1080p with maxed out settings at 60 fps or more, which means Performance mode upscaling can make 4K viable. The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. We're only including more recent GPUs in these charts, as otherwise things get very messy. These are also using our new test PC, which changes the performance slightly from the above table, simply because our newest tests are more relevant (but haven't been run on a lot of the older GPUs shown in the tables). It's also worth noting that the previous generation of graphics cards do still have something to offer, with something like the GTX 1650 Super able to outpace a more modern RTX 3050 in most benchmarks.If, however, you're convinced rasterised performance is the only GPU metric worth a damn in this topsy turvy world of PC gaming, then the RX 7800 XT is probably the best upper mid-range graphics card you can buy today. Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT lands a few percent behind the RX 6600 XT. Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 along with the Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless. Still, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a lot going for it. We're used to seeing GPU generations that arrive on smaller process nodes, redesigned architectures, larger caches, reworked shaders, more memory—the list goes on. But all of that, all at once? That's what RDNA 3 delivers: the whole lot in one fell swoop. We've used two different PCs for our testing. The latest 2022/2023 configuration uses an Alder Lake CPU and platform (with Raptor Lake results coming soon), while our previous testbed uses Coffee Lake and Z390. Here are the details of the two PCs.